Many large contact centers use an analytics-based quality management system like Avaya Aura® Workforce Optimization (WFO). WFO applications for recording, monitoring, and soliciting feedback are typically used to rate contact center agents based on a random sample of calls the agents handle. One or more supervisors and/or quality managers may listen to a recording of a sampled call and/or review text and then rate the agent's handling of the call according to predetermined criteria. However, the information is currently not used directly to route contacts to the best agent because these ratings are only outcomes and are not known until after the contact has been completed. Clearly, using information about agent ratings and other outcomes to route contacts has great potential to improve customer experience and other business outcomes (e.g., reduced cost, increased revenue, etc.). Other outcomes include whether the agent resolved the customer's issue, handling time, holds, business outcomes like revenue, etc.
Avaya Aura® Experience Manager contains a context store, a repository for attributes of contacts that are captured in the course of a contact, often in an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application or other self-service application. Examples of attributes include the type of transaction requested and demographic information about the customer. Most of the attributes are known before the contact is routed to an agent. Additionally, existing quality management implementations do not typically collect ratings in a way that measures all of the true capabilities of agents. Specifically, randomly selecting calls to be rated from among those routed to agents by an existing routing mechanism can introduce substantial bias into the sample, because the sampled contacts are not representative of the contacts an agent could possibly handle. This bias prevents the contact center from learning how well an agent could do on the various types of calls they could receive. This may lead to poor routing decisions and loss of productivity if routing decisions are made based on biased results.